A Village Approach To Removing Roadblocks

By Ann Kathryn Kelly

I thought I had written a gripping memoir. (Don’t we all?)

My story is about the mysterious and ongoing neurological issues I’d experienced from childhood into adulthood. A limp. Crossed eye. Severe headaches. Smaller and weaker muscles on my left side. An ice-cold foot.

After decades without answers, punctuated by doctors’ theories and workarounds, all I could do was adapt—until my symptoms worsened. Nonstop hiccupping for weeks. Dry-heaving every morning. Tingling in my left foot, ankle, and calf.

When I finally found out what had been behind my long history of pain, I faced a frightening choice that would either save my life or put me in a nursing home at age 40.

An irresistible story, right?

I started writing my memoir eight years ago, finished what I thought was a solid draft two years ago, and began querying a year and a half ago. But I got zero interest—though, admittedly, I’d queried only 50 agents.

I set my sights on the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, held in Kansas City in February of this year, hoping it would reignite my passion to begin querying again. Shifting my focus to small and university presses, I reasoned, might be my answer. Several were scheduled to give panel presentations and others had booths in the Book Fair exhibition center.

Invite Insights From Others

I was finishing breakfast on the first day of the conference when another attendee took a seat across from me. We discovered we both wrote memoir. I shared my dismal agent querying stats and said I was at AWP to learn more about opportunities with smaller presses. Sofia agreed that broadening my targets was worthwhile. 

Sofia’s memoir had been published through a Big Five a few years earlier. I asked how she had piqued the interest of her agent and such a sought-after publisher. What she told me made me shake my head. Of course! Why hadn’t I realized this up to now?

Sofia had researched and braided in themes with universal relevance—immigration, discrimination, social justice. She had turned her personal story into something bigger.

We’ve all heard how we need to strive for universality in our writing. But, how many of us take the time to research—in depth—the impacts of a universal theme, and how it can be specifically braided throughout our memoirs? Research is often woven into personal essays, but in memoir? Not so much.

Sofia’s approach landed her not just an agent and publisher, but more readers able to see themselves within the context of her story. Clearly, my memoir was lacking that “something bigger.” Trouble was, I’d been too close to see it.

I felt renewed excitement stirring. Sofia, a stranger minutes earlier, was helping me see that my story contained mostly personal information and not enough universal significance. But how, I pondered, could I thread a universal theme into my draft in a natural way that would complement my arc?

Sofia mentioned a friend whose memoir was also published with a Big Five a year ago. Her friend’s story, like mine, examines a personal health crisis made more devastating because doctors could not name what was causing years of pain and exhaustion.

She promised to introduce us. With that, it was time to head off to our respective sessions.

Back home again, I followed up with Sofia’s friend and learned that she had widened the lens on her personal “mystery illness” story to include research on environmental impacts on sickness, along with gender bias.

Jennifer Lunden’s memoir, American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, now sits on my nightstand. I’m reading it for pleasure and to study how she handled braiding her personal story with universal relevance.

It took more pondering before I understood the larger frame I had to offer. I could braid my personal story with the tug of war between independence and dependence, and the vulnerability it introduces. In sharing the toll my illness took on my family and me, I could also bring in the national impact of caregiving. All of us fear losing our independence, yet it’s something many will encounter through illness or accident. And at some point, many of us will also be caretakers.

I was sitting on two powerfully universal themes with the capacity to entice more readers—and possibly an agent.  

Be Intentional About Networking

Though I went to AWP to attend panel sessions, it was the spontaneous conversations with other writers that proved the most valuable.

We writers can sometimes find networking difficult, but what worked for me was being intentional about what I wanted to learn (querying)—and having the curiosity and flexibility to pivot when introduced to something not on my radar.  

Next time, I’ll go further. I’ll prepare a “script” of issues I’m working through, perhaps my top three. I’ll rehearse, and when I find common ground with a fellow memoirist, whether walking down the hall or standing in line for coffee, I’ll ask about their roadblocks. That will open the door to discussing my own, where I may find yet more aha! moments.

Networking is an opportunity to turn strangers into allies on this shared writing path we travel. My experience at AWP added two people to my village, who helped me see that my memoir has a larger story to tell. After revising based on insights I uncovered through networking, I may just find a portal that leads to agent interest.

__________

Ann Kathryn Kelly writes from New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine and a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals. Learn more at her website.

What You Don’t Know About Publishing (Could Ruin Your Book)

By Peter Mountford

The publishing business is vast and byzantine. What does it mean that your agent is “taking your book to Frankfurt,” or what do you know about the mysterious film/foreign scout network, or Goodreads giveaways, or regional sales reps?

Unfortunately, most aspiring authors don’t understand the publishing world. Flustered, people often choose to self-publish, then feel crushed when only their loved ones (and not many of them, for that matter) buy the book.

Big Takeaway #1: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

For more than ten years, I’ve done an annual publishing intensive webinar or class, where I bring in top agents and acquiring editors from large and small presses. Attendees ask specific questions about what the pros look for in a manuscript and frequent red flags.

The main thing students tell me afterward: they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

For example: there are lots of publishing deals happening. That’s the good news. People often assume traditional publishing is inaccessible. But many new deals are listed daily on Publisher’s Marketplace, often for debut books, and the way these deals are described can tell you a lot about an agent (does a particular agent always lead their debut deal descriptions with the author’s fancy credentials? If so, that tells you what that agent cares about). 

Writers are often surprised by the importance of so-called platform, and that the idea of “platform” varies greatly by genre or individual (you don’t necessarily need a big social media following…but you might). Or the importance of good “comps”—comparison books—somewhat similar books released in the last few years. The search for comps can be fraught, but if a book has genuinely no comparisons in recent years, maybe there’s a reason no one has published anything like this recently.

Agents and editors might also tell you things you wish you’d been thinking about for a long time, like whether they want a “comp” from within the last 10 years, or the last 3 years; whether the comp needs to have sold well, and how to find that out.  

Big Takeaway #2: Publishing People Are Just People, But It’s Smart to Listen to Them

The publishing business is much less intimidating than it might seem. People who work in publishing are generally normal-ish book lovers with an unmistakable taste—a set of interests or a style that they’re passionate about.

Acquisition editors spend as much (if not more) time pitching your book as the agent who sold it to them. They have to “sell” a book they’re interested in to their bosses and sales and marketing departments—which is why it’s crucial to know their taste, which is generally an agent’s job, but you can help, too. Once you meet an editor or an agent and hear them talk, you’ll get a sense of how they explain the books they’re excited about—what characteristics of the book do they focus on when they describe it?

This will help you understand if this agent/editor would be a good match for you, and also how to explain your book in terms they will appreciate.

Big Takeaway #3: Learning to Pitch Your Book is Very Important

Your excellent query letter will contain a pitch (a description of your book that makes it sound appealing)—which will determine whether an agent wants to read your manuscript or not.  

Your agent passes the same pitch, maybe slightly edited, to your editor, who uses it to explain the book to their sales and marketing departments. Those departments use this very same pitch to explain your book to newspapers, magazines, book festivals, booksellers, book bloggers, and more. All of those people will use your query-letter pitch to explain your book to potential readers.

It’s a game of high-stakes telephone. So it pays dividends to develop a pitch that’s compelling, intriguing, and like nothing they’ve heard before.

Here’s the amazing pitch for Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See:

Marie-Laure, a blind Parisian girl, lives near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Both characters are vivid; their problems and their goals are clear.

Last Big Takeaway: Do Your Homework Early

People often don’t think about publishing until they’re done with their book. Then, they try to draft a query letter and realize that they should have been thinking about platform and pitch and more, long before.

You can’t slap together a platform in a couple of weeks. (Well, not usually.)

If your book has big difficulties in its pitch, that’s a concern. What if the solution to that concern involves rethinking the structure of your book?

That said, everyone who sold a debut book today (I count four of them on Publisher’s Marketplace) started where you are. It’s going to be okay.

_______

Join Peter Mountford and CRAFT TALKS for the 2024 Publishing Intensive on May 18 from noon to 6pm Eastern Time. It features literary agent Michelle Brower; VP and senior editor at Penguin Random House Lisa Lucas; and Masie Cochran, editorial director of Tin House Books. We will help writers understand the publishing business, develop a query letter, and learn how to research which agents are a good fit. Find out more/register now.

Peter Mountford is a popular writing coach and teacher with twenty years of experience. The author of the novels A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Washington State Book Award), and The Dismal Science (NYT editor’s choice), as well as the forthcoming collection of short stories, Detonator. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times (Modern Love), Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, Guernica, The Sun, Granta, and Missouri Review.

What I Learned About Essay Writing by Reading for a Literary Magazine

By Jillian Barnet

After Under the Sun published one of my essays, the editors, Martha Highers and Nomi Isenberg, invited me to read for an upcoming issue. My first thought was that I couldn’t possibly find the time. I already struggled to cobble together minutes in my writing chair. However, Martha and Nomi had nurtured my little essay, generously sharing written responses from themselves and eight other readers. Studying their feedback helped me tremendously in the revision process, not only making that essay better, but also assisting me in successfully revising other essays. Their generosity made me want to give back. So, even though I wasn’t sure where I’d find the time, I accepted the invitation to read and comment on roughly 160 submissions over a four-month period, or about ten essays per week, without compensation.

In the spirit of continuing to give back, I’d like to share with you what I learned about writing and submitting essays by being a volunteer reader.

First, I had the opportunity to absorb essays I would not normally have read. The task reminded me of getting a CSA (community-supported agriculture) delivery. When I lived in the city, I supported a local farm by paying a membership fee and in return received a weekly basket of fresh produce. Often, this produce was not what I would normally have selected at the grocery store, but I found ways to integrate the unfamiliar items, such as kohlrabi or purple sweet potatoes, into meals—and they were delicious. The essays functioned similarly: unfamiliar topics, styles, and themes became part of my mental landscape, finding their way into my own creative process. I now push myself to read outside my usual range of topics, styles, and even genres. Adding the unfamiliar to your reading is creatively powerful.

I had the pleasure of reading some very good writing, and the honor of working closely with writers to hone their submissions. For every essay, I was able to see the comments of all the other readers and to learn over time what craft elements were most commonly discussed and important. Often, I’d go back to the essay in question and reread it with those elements in mind. Seeing successes and failures of craft in someone else’s writing, where I could be objective, made it easier to see them in my own. Here are my consequent recommendations to you (and myself) about writing essays for submission to literary magazines:

• Hunt and destroy any cliches. Cliches are the telltale sign we’re reading an inexperienced writer whose prose is not well thought out. When we encounter a cliché, our eyes glaze over and we cease to take you seriously.
• The writing should be tight and focused. Lose extra words, throat clearing, and explanations. If a passage doesn’t serve a clear purpose that supports the essay as a whole, delete it, no matter how good the writing.
• Show, don’t tell. You’ve heard this before, yet we all do it. In essay, it’s much easier to relate the internal than to write the externality of scene. Easier but far less affective. No one wants to be told the Taylor Swift concert was amazing. We want to be there. Put the reader there. Think of yourself as a film producer, the writing as instructions for exactly what the viewer experiences on screen, down to the least detail. You can cut later.
• Essay, like story needs a clear narrative arc. Something, usually the narrator, should change as a result of the action. An inciting incident leads to a journey or discovery, sometimes a crisis, and that leads to some sort of change. These elements of narrative arc don’t have to be as dramatic as they sound. Sometimes they’re quite subtle, but if there’s no arc, there’s no story, just description that reads like an unfinished journal entry.
• It helps if the subject of your essay is unusual. Readers routinely set aside pieces about loved ones dying from cancer, pet death, or grieving a parent. But give us the mysterious murder of a popular high school girl and we’re all in. Bonus points if the topic is one we’ve never seen before, like trepanation.
• There should be something at stake. As in every good story, something important should be at risk. Just because you’re writing a shorter piece doesn’t mean you can do away with the element that makes the reader care and keeps them turning the pages.
• Your essay should make a point. This is what Jeannine Ouellette calls “aboutness.” Aboutness is neither theme nor plot, but something in between. Aboutness is grounded in the stakes of the piece. Does your essay stay on the surface or have deeper meaning at its core? For more on aboutness, read Ouellette’s essay here.
• The narrator should exhibit self-awareness and/or introspection. This includes being as critical of oneself as of other characters, but goes beyond that. Self-awareness—our separateness from others and our acknowledgement of what we bring to the topic at hand—is vital for critical thinking, and critical thinking is the lifeblood of essay.

I thought reading for a literary magazine would be an altruistic chore, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while. It improved my writing and editing skills and introduced me to a new segment of the writing community. In the case of Under the Sun, readers learned from one another, cheered each other’s publishing successes, and shared information about magazines where we might want to submit. Building community with other writers is part of good literary citizenship, fosters valuable connections, and creates good karma. I look forward to doing it again, perhaps for a different publication.

Next time you have a piece accepted, think about offering to be a reader. The editors will likely be thrilled, and you’ll benefit too. 
___
Jillian Barnet’s writing explores family, the fallout of closed adoption, and transplantation to a rural farming community. Her essays and poems have appeared in Best American Essays, North American Review, New Letters, Nimrod, and Image, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of the poetry chapbook, Falling Bodies. Links to some of her work can be found at www.jillianbarnetwrites.com. Jillian lives on a tiny farm in the Finger Lakes where she is at work on a memoir.

Micro Memoir Recipe Box

By Heather Sellers

Micro memoirs are true stories told in tight packages—from a deft paragraph to a page or two. They are delicious to read, but devilishly difficult to write.  Micro memoir requires strong story-telling skills (plot! character! turns! depth!) alongside careful attention to metaphor, compression, and evocative language. And you have to do this all in about a minute. 

As a writer and as a teacher, I am wild about micros. Because so many crucial writing skills come into play, and you can work on micros in short bursts of time, they are the perfect form for the classroom at every level, and for writers in any genre who want to hone their technique.

Some micros lean more poetic, with rich language and less plot focus. Others blend story and poem. At the other end of the spectrum is a story rendered completely in dialogue and action—a full-blown scene.

There’s a wide range of “normal” in this form, and I encourage writers to try various kinds of micros, along the spectrum, to see the most growth. (Brevity’s “Resources for Teaching” presents a terrific set of prompts and well-organized archives of great micro reading alongside craft essays.)

Here are two recipes for beginning and developing a micro, so you can experiment across the continuum.

1.  POETIC LYRIC MICRO RECIPE

The poetic micro uses an image to create emotion in the reader. The poem-micro shifts in time, using surprising syntax, leaps, and extreme close observation to achieve its effects.

Read “Counting Bats” by Thao Thai. Notice the compelling use of description (“claws gripping the fine, flossy strands that wind protectively around my head”). Notice the alliteration (“fine” and “flossy”; “Four are points on a pirate-compass, ready to plunder”) and the arresting syntax: “I tell you we’ve got bats.”  “Count with me now.” “What comes before one?”

This writer removes connective tissue in order to create poetic rhythm—we leap from crisp observation to haunting question (“What drives a woman out of hiding?”) to supposition (“Nowhere, I tell you. Nowhere comes before one.”) These poetic moves make the micro vibrant, memorable, and evocative.

To write your poetic micro, start with an arresting image: an animal, or some specific object or person in your home that provokes you.

1. Observe your subject carefully and write three lines of description.
2. Ask four questions about the subject, your life, what troubles you.
3. Describe yourself, in tension with your subject matter.
4. Address the reader directly, with one or two lines about what you need help with.
5. Leap to something your ancestors have told you, or that you have heard from someone elder, or someone else in the home or neighborhood.
6. Write this line: “Let’s start again.”
7. Describe the image you began with again, in a new way.
8. Ask another question.
9. With your non-dominant hand, write the answer.

As you work on the micro, choose words that connect to each other sonically, threading alliteration, assonance, and consonance throughout your piece. Allow the piece to turn and jump—trust that the reader will be able to follow as you examine this object, and your own interior.

• MICRO IN SCENE RECIPE

To write a micro in scene, choose a place and time with you and another person engaged in a difficult or complex moment of tension. It doesn’t have to be bad tension—just intense or weighted in some significant way.

In my micro, “In Graves with My Student Elizabeth,” I launched my piece in a classroom in a building on my campus named “Graves Hall.” Students often stay after class with questions, and on this particular Friday afternoon, right before Spring Break, one student lingered, weeping. I chose to simply shoot the movie of that moment, describing what she looked like, what she said and did, and what I said and did: action and dialogue and almost nothing else.  The only additional information I included was the fact that both of our mothers were gone.

I have discovered that if I hew closely to action and dialogue set in a highly charged moment, the micro will actually write itself.  For additional examples, check out Beth Ann Fennelly’s collection of micro memoir, Heating & Cooling.

Here’s the recipe I use:

1. Choose your place and time—where the micro movie will take place, and when.
2. Title the piece with the name of the location and the name of the person you are with, and who they are to you.
3. The first line simply states when this is happening.
4. Then, show us where the light is coming from in this scene.
5. Describe what you are doing. Describe what the other person is doing. Use close observation, and fresh details. Do not include emotions.
6. Where is everyone else?
7. Track the action and dialogue as it plays out over the next five, ten, fifteen minutes.
8. Include a leap to something surprising at the halfway mark: the history of a word, a reference to a dream, or a description of something you yearn for, unrelated to the moment.
9. Return to describing action and dialogue, beat by beat, alternating between you and the other person.
10. End on a line of dialogue.

______

Join Heather Sellers for her CRAFT TALKS webinar, Micro Memoir: Writing and Publishing Tiny True Stories. May 8th, 2PM Eastern Time – $25, replay sent to all registrants.

Heather Sellers is the author of, most recently, How to Make Poems, an e-textbook with embedded audio lectures, and Field Notes from the Flood Zone, a collection of prose poems, which won a State of Florida Book Award. She teaches privately in the MFA program at the University of South Florida, where she has won multiple teaching awards. Check out her website to learn about upcoming online and in person workshops.

Here’s the Thing

By Gary Reddin

You write the thing. Then you rewrite the thing. Then again and again until it’s done. That last part is key. Because you don’t decide when your writing is finished – it does. This, or some approximation of it, is the advice I give new writers when asked. And for the most part, I believe in it. But I’ve never been a planner, not when it comes to writing. Or, if I’m being honest – and the thing demands I be honest – that lack of planning extends to my life overall. The only plan I’ve ever made, ever truly been sure of from the get-go, was that I wanted to be a writer. But even my writing career is a heuristic one. I’m not quite a novelist, or poet, or a screenwriter, or journalist. Hell, even my MFA just says, “in writing.” Not in fiction, or nonfiction, or anything that could lend itself to the idea that I’ve ever mastered the thing. If a casual acquaintance asks what I write, I tell them I’m “genrefluid.” Which is fun, quirky, and just technical enough to keep them from asking for more specifics. What I want to say, of course, is “everything.” I write everything. And each piece is its own thing. A poem thing. A fiction thing. A craft essay thing.

But what do I know about anything? I went to college ten years ago on a government program for people who’d lost their jobs in the oil and gas industry. I became a journalist because it was the closest you could come to “being a writer” in Oklahoma. I went to graduate school during the pandemic. And now I’m somehow working with one of the most popular young adult novelists of the past decade. But the truth is, despite that meandering if semi-successful history: I can’t tell you how to write the thing. I don’t think anyone can. Which maybe invalidates this whole essay. And if that ends up being the case – after I’ve written the thing, then rewritten the thing, and then rewritten it again until it’s done – well, I’m sorry. But I hope that I’ve done enough to bring you to the end with me. Because I do think it has something to say. And we’re close now. Close to the heart of the thing. Because I have one more piece of advice. One I save for the people I trust, and something tells me I can trust you. So here it is: don’t edit yourself. Which is to say, rewrite the thing – again, and again, and again until it’s done. But don’t cut it open like some 8th-grade biology project. Don’t pin it to a board or press its wings under glass like a moth in your collection. You can’t piece it together like a puzzle. It’s a wild, wanting creature, this thing we call writing. It yearns for the reader. So let the thing live as it was born: ravenous.

__

Gary Reddin grew up in Southwest Oklahoma, where he mythologized Springsteen lyrics as gospel truth. These days, he writes from Southern California but still considers himself Oklahoma’s son. He is the author of An Abridged History of American Violence, and Quantum Entanglement. He can be found everywhere online as @reddinwrites, though it’s mostly pictures of his dog.

God Meets With His Editor

By Ali Solomon 

GOD: Did you get the new tablets I sent you?  

EDITOR: I did. All seventy-five of them.  

GOD: And? What do you think?  

EDITOR: Some good stuff in there—”Thou shalt not spit on the ground in public.” Solid. “Thou shalt not double-dip in thy neighbor’s honey.” Also gold. 

GOD: But? 

EDITOR: We’re trying to tighten this up, make it as relatable as possible.  

GOD: Spitting on the ground is gross.  

EDITOR: I agree. Totally gross. But do people hate it as much as, let’s say, the stealing thing you wrote about on Tablet #9? 

GOD: Spitting is literally the worst thing mankind can do. The world would be much better off without spitters. 

EDITOR: Again, I’m getting that. But are you saying it’s worse than murdering? 

GOD: Spitters should be murdered. 

EDITOR: I don’t think that’s going to play well. Let’s strike it from the tablet.  

GOD: What? No! 

EDITOR: I’m sorry, I know this is hard, but we need to cut more than 80% of this. People have short attention spans—they aren’t going to read more than a handful of commandments. Like, ten or fifteen, tops.  

GOD: Can we keep the spitting thing, and cut, I don’t know, the adultery one? 

EDITOR: Are you sure? I kinda think that’s a good rule to live by. 

GOD: People are going to commit adultery anyway. It’s in their nature. In fact, having a commandment forbidding them from doing so is only going to make them want to commit even more adultery. 

Ali Solomon

EDITOR: I’m predicting a lot of messed up family dynamics if we lose that one. Speaking of messed up families—the commandment about honoring thy father, mother, siblings, grandparents, uncles, cousins, and stepchildren: any chance that we can trim it to “honoring thy father and mother?” 

GOD: Won’t all the other family members be pissed off?  

EDITOR: I think respecting the parents who raised you is the most important part. 

GOD: What about cousins? 

EDITOR: Most people’s cousins are assholes. I think it’s safe to leave them out of the commandment. 

GOD: O.K., I’ll make the change. 

EDITOR [heaving through the tablets]: Can we talk about your last eleven tablets? They seem a bit…targeted. 

GOD: What do you mean? 

EDITOR: Well, all these commandments seem directed at one person, some dude named “Lyle,” who may or may not have used your name in vain once. 

GOD: He stepped in gum and shouted “Goddamnit” at the top of his lungs. Everyone heard him.  

EDITOR: That’s pretty rough, but eleven tablets about Lyle?  

GOD: He took my name in vain, on the Sabbath no less! And when he couldn’t get the gum off the bottom of his sandal, he even said…he said…he didn’t believe in Me! 

EDITOR: Yikes. 

GOD: And none of this would’ve happened if someone hadn’t literally spit on the ground.  

EDITOR [sighing]: Lose the direct attacks on Lyle. Like, maybe we consolidate all that vitriol into “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain?” Does that work? 

GOD: I guess.  

EDITOR: And maybe for future commandments, we leave out specific people’s names? Keep it vague: “Thou shalt keep the Sabbath and make it holy,” instead of “Lyle shalt keep the Sabbath.” You’ll use up less stones that way. 

GOD: I don’t mind if we use up lots of stones. If I don’t spell out detailed codes of conduct, people are going to morph into monsters. 

EDITOR: As I said before, no one is going to read seventy-five tablets. You basically have ten commandments to try and reel them in, otherwise they’ll check out and be off having orgies and worshipping golden calves and shit. Let’s reallllllly narrow this down.  

GOD: Keep the spitting one, obviously. 

EDITOR: We can circle back to that one later. What about these, on Tablet #16: “Thou shalt not wear socks with sandals.” Or, “Thou shalt not don tunics above the knee after age 40.” Are we really in the business of policing Your people’s wardrobes?  

GOD: Have you seen what folks these days are wearing? It’s a disgrace. 

EDITOR: I’m not sure we should be wasting tablets on dress codes. What about moral conduct? Can we home in on what makes someone a good human being? 

GOD: I honestly don’t know. I thought the double-dipping commandment, and the one about putting cute hats on donkeys took care of that! 

EDITOR: Let’s keep in the ones about not murdering or stealing. Or lying, especially when it’s lying about murdering and stealing. 

GOD: So no donkey hats? 

EDITOR: We have to kill some of your darlings. 

GOD: “Thou shalt not kill thy darlings!” 

EDITOR: Good one, God. 

GOD: While we’re on a roll, I guess we can lose the commandments about sending back food in taverns, and not paying back people in shekels. They’re important, but not more important than killing and stealing and spitting. 

EDITOR: Good, good! This is definitely punchier; it’ll read much better with the overseas market too if they have to translate fewer commandments. So let’s talk about the title. 

GOD: You don’t like “Things That Make God Angry?” 

EDITOR: No, it’s great, really. But we may want a more direct title, one that gets to the point, without sounding so…mad. 

GOD: “Do These Things Please.” 

EDITOR: Hmmm…better, but not quite there yet. 

GOD: But I said “please.” 

EDITOR: What about “The Ten Commandments”? It’s direct, concise, and even works if someday someone wants to buy the rights and turn Your masterpiece into a movie. 

GOD: That would be amazing—the royalties would sustain me for years. I’d never need to write anything else. 

EDITOR: I’m pretty sure The Ten Commandments will be public domain. 

GOD: GodDAMMIT. 

________

Ali Solomon is a writer/illustrator from New York. She regularly contributes to the New Yorker, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Believer, among other places. She was the illustrator for I Am “Why Do I Need Venmo” Years Old (Running Press, 2021), and the author/illustrator of I Love(ish) New York City: Tales of City Life (Chronicle, 2022). 

What’s in a Name?—The Risks of Writing About Family

By Laurie Hertzel

When the editor of a literary journal asked me to contribute to his final issue a few years ago, I had only one essay that was ready to send, one I hadn’t planned on publishing. It was autobiographical, an account of the accidental death of my oldest brother, told through the eyes of nine-year-old me.

I knew I was taking a risk. Several members of my family deeply value their privacy, and they have let me know they disapprove of my writing about family. And I didn’t want my mother, who was then 91, to see the essay and relive the death of her eldest son.

But I also thought that a story of how a family tragedy affects a child was one worth telling. The journal had a low profile, so I submitted the essay and hoped for the best. Two years after it was published, someone in my family found it and sent it around.

The uproar lasted for days, all via family group email. The subject line of what became a very long message thread was, “This makes me sick.”

Some of my siblings were hostile, some were sarcastic, some demanded to know what else I was working on. Others were measured; they might not have liked that I had written about a painful time in our family, but they were not about to tell me what to do.

After the initial fury came suggestions, which fell somewhere between requests and demands. The first one was relatively simple, if painful: I agreed to ask the editor to take the essay off the web, and he did.

The other requests were more complicated. Several siblings asked that I never again name them in my writing. Some asked that I use pseudonyms; some asked that I never mention them in any way. One sibling said he didn’t want me to reveal that he is a twin.

This experience has left me uncertain. Is it wrong to tell a family story when some in the family don’t want you to? Anne Lamott’s oft-quoted advice, “you own everything that happened to you,” isn’t realistic—she doesn’t follow it herself. She said in an interview that she gave her family “complete veto power” over her 2012 memoir Some Assembly Required.

With my family, it’s more difficult. If given veto power, some of them would veto every word.

I understand my siblings’ desire for privacy, so I have been struggling to figure out how to accommodate their requests and still write truthfully.

So far, I don’t see a clear path.

If, in my essays, I claim to have fewer siblings than I actually have; and if I don’t acknowledge that some of them are twins; and if I give everyone fake names, at what point does this become an imaginary family? When does circumspect memoir tilt into fiction?

I know that it’s fairly common now for memoirs to include composite characters and pseudonyms, but this doesn’t feel like a solution, at least not for siblings. Names are tied to personalities; change the name, you change the persona.  

And really, wouldn’t it be easy for anyone who knows my family to figure out who is who? Fake names seem to be no real protection at all.

I have talked about this with my friend Marion Winik, a prolific and talented essayist and memoirist. At one time, she said, she believed that real names must be used, but since the rise of the internet, when anyone can Google anyone, she has backed away from that. At this point, she said, people need all the privacy they can get.

Again, no clear path.

Stories are subjective and memories are always flawed, so for a personal essay to be credible you need facts to hang those memories on – names, dates, places, verifiable events. The fact that my brother, John Patrick Hertzel, drowned at Maple Lake in Minnesota at age 18 on June 11, 1966, is verifiable, supported not only by my memories but by newspaper stories and the sheriff’s report and the sad existence of my brother’s grave.

I believe that facts are crucial; facts anchor stories, ground them, help us show who we are. A personal essay built on fabrication has no meaning. I am number seven of ten children, and my place in the family has much to do, I think, with who I am. Change the birth order, change the number of children, change my name, and I am different. We are different.

It might be that the real kindness would be for me to simply switch topics, turn to fiction, write about something other than my fascinating and complicated family.

“Beware the small, gratuitous hurt,” I wrote in this space eight years ago, quoting memoirist Emily Fox Gordon. Try not to cause harm.

But what if someone feels harmed simply by being mentioned?

Do I change their names and distort reality? Do I use their names and cause them grief?

For now, I have paused publishing. I have not paused writing, and I have not figured this out.

__________

Laurie Hertzel is the author of the memoir News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist (University of Minnesota Press). She reviews books for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Georgia.

Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief

In his latest memoir, Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief, B.J. Hollars chronicles a year that brought the cancer diagnosis of his father-in-law, the intense uncertainty of covid, and the struggles he and his wife Meredith faced raising three young children in the midst of all this. Hollars writes in diary style, but with sharply rendered scenes, and accompanies the narrative with photographs and family interviews. Author Tessa Fontaine describes this small gem of a book as “one of the most tender, big-hearted accounts of grief and love I’ve ever read.”

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore interviewed Hollars recently about the book, the choices he made in structure, and the importance of awareness.
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DINTY: Structuring a memoir as a diary, or series of journal entries, is a narrative choice I regularly warn my writing students against. The structure is restrictive, on one hand, and on the other hand requires regularly sequenced entries, some of which may actually be superfluous to the story. Yet you pull it off, rather brilliantly, in Year of Plenty. Any advice on how you did that? Was it the structure you intended all along?

B.J.: Well, thanks for the kind words! I’m so close to the material, I’ve had a terribly difficult time determining if I’ve pulled off anything or not. That’s been one of the greater challenges throughout. But certainly, I agree with your advice, and I offer the same warning to my own students. The danger, I often share, is that the diary/journal form can sometimes “excuse” the writer from having to craft anything. And if it’s an actual diary, it can become too “precious.”

I think Beth Kephart said that memoir is a “made thing” and that it requires “shaping.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot while writing this book. I’ve also been thinking of some advice from a friend who remarked that the more emotional the subject matter, the less dramatic the language ought to be. Both pieces of advice have served me well throughout the book.

As to the last part of your question on whether this was the structure I intended, I think it was. In the beginning, it wasn’t a book, just a series of voice memos, emails to me, photographs, and notes on the backs of receipts. But when I gathered all these up, I was able to piece back the days. And while the scenes are accompanied by dates, that’s mostly a technique to create some immediacy. I wanted readers to sort of relive the experience alongside me in “real-time.”

DINTY: The other unexpected choice you make is to include family interviews. The interview chapters are very brief, and often not directly focused on your father-in-law Steve’s cancer or death, but instead just revisiting memories. You even interview your very youngest children. I wouldn’t have thought to do that, but it creates a lovely intimacy.

B.J.: The interviews were a way for the rest of my family to speak directly without my “shaping” the prose. There were limits to my experiences, but by providing them some “unshaped” space, I was trying to make room for the myriad of experiences we shared but also lived independently. I will never fully understand what they felt, though I was there for most of it. These interviews were a way for me to see what I missed and to honor their own place in the story.

I also included some photographs. This was a way to give it a “family scrapbook” vibe without too much purposeful curation. The photos are nothing special on their own, but when I paired them with the vignettes, I noticed some strange juxtapositions emerging.

“Intimacy” is exactly the word for it. I suppose I was always looking for ways to invite readers into these moments in the hopes that they might reflect on their own experiences. The interviews and photographs were two ways in.

DINTY: Part of what fascinates me so much about your book is that it serves as a remarkable eulogy of your father-in-law, but it is much about you and your family, the joys of course, but also an honest examination of the challenges of parenting, of marriage, and an inquiry into how we spend our days and weeks and months. How can we make the most of our time, when time feels so short?

B.J. Just yesterday, I read an article in The Washington Post that noted how when we lose someone close to us, we have a neurological drive to “go out and look” for them. Writing this book was my attempt to go out and look for my father-in-law after his death. But it also prompted some introspection, of course. 

I haven’t reached any definitive conclusions. I’m the same person I was before I wrote this book and before my father-in-law died, but I am a little more aware of the minutes, the hours, and the days. I suppose our awareness is about the only factor within our full control. We can’t necessarily “extend” our time on this earth, but we can choose to live in the present and hold tight to the seconds as they tick past. It’s easy to “kill” time; it’s harder to savor it.

DINTY: Of course, what you describe just above is the definition of a writer. The poet Mary Oliver writes,

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

What is astonishing you now? Do you have a new project already underway?

B.J.: Last summer, my daughter and I completed the Montana Dinosaur Trail, a 14-stop road trip of all things dinosaurs. We talked with paleontologists, commercial fossil hunters, and any number of strangers in small Montana towns who quickly became friends. We camped in state parks and KOAs and literally dug up a hadrosaur bone. It was one of the most astonishing adventures of my lifetime. I’ve been writing about it ever since.
___

B.J. Hollars is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Year of Plenty. (You can view the book trailer here.)The founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, he is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

An Unlikely Writer

By Deborah Ann Lucas

We moved every year when I was young, making me the perpetual new kid. One day during the summer after fifth grade, I complained I had nothing to do. Busy making dinner, Mom sent me out into the small Michigan town to find a library—my first. I walked around the block, climbed the stairs, and entered a cavernous room. The smell of musty books enveloped me. As my anxiety grew, the room blurred. I couldn’t figure out the catalog system. But Mom expected me to bring home a book. Unable to find one with horses, I grabbed a few off the shelves, signed for a card, and ran home.

I returned the books late. Mostly unread.

You see, I couldn’t see the words.

It’s my eyes. They don’t work well together. The eye doctor couldn’t explain why. My first pair of glasses helped me see the chalkboard but didn’t help me with reading. I kept losing my place at the end of each line, then had to search the page for what came next. After a few lines, I’d fall asleep. My eyes were focusing behind the page, but I didn’t know that then.

I earned good grades by paying attention in class—a skill I learned from listening to Dad tell his stories. I was a storyteller, too, when I found someone to listen. I couldn’t imagine how I’d write them down but swore that one day I would.

At 27, I longed to study Art in college, but signed up for Architecture instead. “Artists don’t make enough money,” my controlling husband said. I loved being a student, but not being well read continued to haunt me. I confided to my brother’s partner while we were cooking that I felt illiterate. He turned to me. “You’re not dumb. You have an eye tracking issue called Binocular Vision Dysfunction that runs in families. Your brother has it. That’s how I know.”

Why had no one ever told me?

The only treatment I found for BVD was eye muscle exercises, but with little result, I let them fall by the wayside. Meanwhile, my insatiable curiosity and willingness to ask questions helped me thrive, though my hunger for an education cost me my first marriage. Later, with the support of my second husband, I returned to my first passion—fine art.

At 40, I earned my second degree in ceramics, an MFA at UCLA. Working with my hands minimized my need to read. But when my brother and his partner died of AIDS, I set my art aside and began to write memoir, lining the walls of my home with books to teach me how. Over the next few years, I lost what remained of my family. Though flawed, they had lived extraordinary lives; their dying too soon made me keeper of their stories. I longed to write them down.

And yet my vision problems persisted. With my hands on the keyboard, I drifted asleep, the weight of one finger repeating a letter until I woke to delete and begin again. To stay awake, I drank coffee, ate chocolate, and splashed cold water on my face to push through another page or two. Prisms in my glasses barely helped.

I nevertheless pushed on, breathing my way through pages about my family, identity and my search for home. Unearthing stories I hadn’t known I remembered opened insights into my struggles as a girl, a woman, and now as a writer—helping me heal. Mentors told me to sharpen and tighten my scenes, and to read memoir. More work. More time. More fighting my eyes.

Over the years, I’ve learned the eye infirmity that forces me to read slower and closer than most, in truth enriches my writing. When I zero in to stay focused, I hear the lyricism of each phrase, I see words that drag or stop the flow, I sense where to rearrange and redline. Muscle strain and headaches still force me to take breaks to rest my eyes. Luckily, I type fast, because once I begin, the stories pour out like rivers in a spring thaw. I’ve had essays published in anthologies and a journal. With sheer determination, I’ve written two novels and split my memoir, expanding it into two full manuscripts.

During the pandemic, I endured a four-year illness requiring five surgeries, which confined me to a wheelchair for more than a year to save my leg. I continued to write as therapy, sometimes on my laptop in the ER waiting room. As I healed, I became a certified book coach to help other women find their stories, and now work one-on-one and with a group, supporting them while sharing my passion for writing.

My book coach training also helped me claim my slow reading as an asset: I see what others might miss. Through the eyes of an artist, I visualize a story’s shape, shades, and colors…and feel its flow. When I write, I use all that I am, authentically, proud of my differences and my perseverance to have come this far.

I am an unlikely writer, driven by a deep responsibility to keep my family’s dreams alive through my words…enabling me to live within mine. To achieve your dream, persist. Don’t let anything stop you.

___

Deborah Ann Lucas lives on twenty acres in rural Northern Illinois with her husband and her rescue animals, including two senior off-track thoroughbreds. She creates art, and writes about healing with horses, and finding home, with plans to release her debut memoir Dance While the Fire Burns later this year. As a book coach certified by Author Accelerator in Fiction and Memoir, she works with women to envision, structure, and complete books about their own healing journeys. Her superpowers are empathy, enthusiasm, and perseverance.

Writing Memoir—It’s a “We” Program

By Elizabeth Jannuzzi

The other day I was trying to be a good student—something I never was when I was in school—and I was completing my homework for a writing course. At the start of this year, I enrolled in a five-month program to learn how to seek representation for my debut memoir about my recovery from alcoholism. I was working on the summary of the book for the query letter when I plummeted deep into a pit of self-doubt.

“Why am I doing this?” I asked myself with my head in my hands. “No one wants to read my memoir. I’m wasting everyone’s time. What do I have to show for these years I’ve spent writing? What is the point of any of it?”

What made my self-doubt feel worse was that I’m currently leading a group of writers in a yearlong book writing program, book inc’s Memoir Incubator, the same one I completed in 2022 to write my memoir. I’m there as their guide and champion, cheering them on with the belief that if I can do it, so can they! 

But at that moment, as tears of self-doubt filled my eyes, I didn’t feel like I could do any of this. Not find an agent, not lead other memoirists, and not even write this damn query letter. The imposter syndrome was real and intense.

But that moment passed, as moments do. And I realized something: it’s because I have these occasional plummets into self-doubt that I am uniquely qualified to shepherd writers along this journey, help them overcome their doubts, and keep writing. 

“Uniquely qualified” – where had I heard that phrase before? Oh yes, I know, from my sponsor and in the rooms of recovery.

I’ve been an active member of a 12-step recovery program for 13 years now. One of the first things I learned when I got sober was that my experience––my particular brand of alcoholism––is one of my greatest assets, because I can use it to help someone else who is struggling with the same issues I struggled with. I share my experience, strength, and hope with a newcomer. That newcomer learns that they are not alone. And if I can stay sober with the problems I faced, so can they. I, in turn, stay sober because my life now has a meaning and a purpose: to help another sick and suffering alcoholic. It’s a symbiotic relationship. I help you, you help me, and together we stay sober.

The genesis of this recovery program began in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, not when Bill W, one of its founders, stopped drinking, but when Bill W. met Dr. Bob. Previously, Dr. Bob was unable to stay sober. But after connecting with and learning from a fellow alcoholic, he never drank again. The program’s communal aspect is emphasized in its first step: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.” It’s a “we” program.

The Memoir Incubator I’m leading is a “we” program as well. Technically, you can write a book on your own. Many people have done it. I couldn’t, though. I needed the support, community, and accountability of a writing group to overcome recurring moments of self-doubt and resistance. And now, I can pass on what I learned in that program to other writers. I understand the obstacles they are facing because I face them too. I can share with them my experience, strength, and hope as a writer.   

In my recovery program, when someone experiences a momentary lapse in their program, we say, “Ok, that happened. Now pick your butt off the floor and put it back in the seat.”

That’s what I did after my moment of despair when writing my query letter. I let myself feel my doubts, shared them with my fellow writers to get them out of my head, and then sat back down in my seat and got back to writing. Now when a writer comes to me in distress asking, “Why am I doing this? No one wants to read this!” I can say I know how you feel, and here’s what I do to keep writing.

_________

Elizabeth Jannuzzi is a writer and a program manager at book inc, a writing collective dedicated to helping writers draft, revise, and publish memoirs and novels. Her essays have been featured in The Rumpus, Counter Clock, Off Topic Publishing, and HerStry. In 2018, she received an honorable mention in Memoir Magazine’s Recovery Contest. For links to her weekly Substack on writing and recovery and her other publications, please visit her book inc Writer page.